American Flag Farthest From Home Is Leaving Solar System

John Casani, Voyager project manager in 1977, shows of a small Dacron flag that was folded and sewed into the thermal blankets of the Voyager spacecraft before they launched 33 years ago. Voyager 2 stands behind him before heading to the launch pad in August 1977. Full Story.Credit: NASA/JPL

This July 4th, U.S. citizens around the world may proudly
display American flags to celebrate Independence Day while away from home, but
they won't hold a candle to the farthest American flag in history, which is
leaving the entire solar system behind on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft.

The spaceflying American flag is a not a huge version of
Old Glory, but will be the only one flying more than
10.5 billion miles (16.9 billion km) from Earth this Fourth
of July. It is riding on Voyager 1, a 33-year-old space probe on the
outskirts of our solar system.

Another far-flung American flag is flying on Voyager 2,
which is about 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from
Earth. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are on trajectories to leave the solar
system behind after passing through a magnetic bubble-like region called the
heliosphere.

A? NASA photo of the Voyager 2 American flag shows
it to be a small U.S. standard packed alongside other mementos from Earth, like
the iconic golden record that were also launched the spacecraft and contain
messages from Earth for any extraterrestrials that may find them.

?We were extraordinarily proud of what we were doing as a
laboratory, as a part of NASA and as a country and we felt it was important to
make a statement to that effect,? said Jet Propulsion laboratory scientist John
Casani, NASA's Voyager project manager at the time it was launched, in a
statement provided to SPACE.com this week. ?I?m gratified that Voyager is still
sailing out there, bearing America?s colors. What it represents to us is an
affirmation of the pride we had at that time."

Voyager 2's space flag is a 16-inch (40-cm) long version
of the Stars and Stripes made of Dacron that engineers painstakingly sewed into
the insulating blankets of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which launched in 1977 on
a tour of the solar system's gas giant planets. A similar flag is flying on the
Voyager 1 spacecraft, which also launched in 1977. [Voyager
mission photos.]

The American flags riding the Voyager probes are not the
only distant U.S. standards out in space. Flags were planted on the moon by
American astronauts during the six Apollo lunar landings in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. NASA probes to Mars and elsewhere also include the U.S. standard.

But the two Voyager
probes are currently the farthest human-built objects from
Earth, making their American flags the most distance from U.S soil. The probes'
signals take nearly 13 hours to travel to NASA's worldwide Deep Space Network
of listening antennas and back.

NASA launched both spacecraft in the summer of 1977, but
only Voyager 2 took a so-called "grand tour" of the solar
system when it visited the gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s by taking advantage of a rare planetary
alignment that occurs once every 176 years. Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and
Saturn.

On June 28, Voyager 2 hit a major milestone when it
marked the 12,000th day of its mission. Voyager one, which launched later than its
counterpart, will hit the same milestone on July 13.

?I?m proud of the people who worked on this and put so
much of their life and energy into building, developing and flying that thing,"
Casani said. "They did it right.?